AnyClip: The Coolest Video Sharing App You Probably Won’t See for Years

Anyclip, a new web startup, wants to let you search through the world’s movies and find any moment from any movie and watch it or share it with your friends, complete with a link to places to buy or rent the film.

Unfortunately, you might never get to use Anyclip in your lifetime, unless Hollywood decides that the internet isn’t an alien life force come to earth to suck the life force from their business model.

Just imagine Hollywood saying over and over again, “Show me the money,” as AnyClip explains that giving away a bit will make them money — later.

The company demoed its search technology on Tuesday at TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco, showing how it is able to search out dialogue and scenes from movies like The Big Lebowski based on scripts and metadata.

Users can then see up to four minutes of a film, more than long enough to capture memorable moments in films, whether that be the Star Wars bar scene or Cary Grant bantering with Katherine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby. From there, they can simply watch the film or send a link to it to their friends. Meanwhile, AnyClip adds links that lets people then rent or buy the film.

The crowd, and the judges on stage, were clearly impressed with the product and its audacity.

But TechCrunch50 judge Sean Parker, the president of Facebook, thought it might be a bit hard to get the content folks to sign on to an innnovative service that puts their content online — without their control.

He should know.

Parker famously co-founded Napster, the net’s original music file sharing service that was sued out of business by the music industry at the beginning of the decade — despite Napster’s attempt to strike licensing deals. That led forced decentralization of file sharing quickly led to peer-to-peer file sharing services where illicit music sharing is rampant.

But AnyClip’s CEO Aaron Cohen said he was tenacious enough and will to play by the rules. He also thinks deals will be easier for his service since the net isn’t as scary any more and his company only wants to share small parts of films.

“Over time we will get it all,” Cohen said. “Think about ESPN — they are great sports network but they just got the NFL last year.”

Reid Hoffman, one of the founders of both PayPal and LinkedIn, cautioned that deals will be hard and wondered who the company’s “ambassador” was.

Cohen had a good answer: his lead investor was former Sony President of USA Mickey Schulhof.

Despite that juice, Parker warned the founder that it would still be a long, frustrating endeavor.

“What you guys need is tenacity,” Parker said. “However long you think it will take to do the deals, it will take twice as long.”